Willa Sibert Cather

Willa Cather was born December 7, 1873, near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine years old, her family moved to the town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, living among the newly-arrived immigrants from Europe. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After college she spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh.

Cather published a few short stories before becoming managing editor of McClure’s and, in 1912, began writing novels full-time. She moved to New York City and worked for six years on the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for “One of Ours.” She died on April 24, 1947.

“No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.”

“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

“The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky.”

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.”

“When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.”